Product description

An artist's journal is packed with sketches and captions; some rough, some polished. The margins sometimes spill over with hurriedly scrawled shopping lists and phone numbers. The cover may be travel-worn and the pages warped from watercolors. Open the book, and raw creativity seeps from each color and line. The intimacy and freedom on its pages are almost like being inside the artist's mind: You get a direct window into risks, lessons, mistakes, and dreams. The private worlds of these visual journals are exactly what you'll find inside An Illustrated Life. This book offers a sneak peak into the wildly creative imaginations of 50 top illustrators, designers and artists. Included are sketchbook pages from R. Crumb, Chris Ware, James Jean, James Kochalka, and many others. In addition, author Danny Gregory has interviewed each artist and shares their thoughts on living the artistic life through journaling.

Author information

Danny Gregory has lived all over the world from Australia to Pakistan. He is currently Executive Creative Director of ad agency McGarry Bowen. His visual journaling Yahoo group has more than 2,300 members and his Everyday Matters blog receives thousands of visitors a month.

Customer reviews

What a fantastic gallery this book is. It displays lots of sketches from 50 illustrators, designers and artists and an introduction (sometimes over a few pages) to each of them, their work, why and how they sketch and titbits like which pens they use. What I especially like is that so many different artistic styles are represented: drawings, paintings, illustrations, doodles, comics and mixed-media art journal pages. The subjects include everything from landscapes and scenes to lists and records of daily living, food eaten and places visited. The more than 250 pages provide wonderful glimpses into the lives of the artists, who come from a variety of backgrounds.

I'm not enamored of all the artists showcased - in fact, I personally found a lot of the works rather ugly - but there is no doubt the book is a treasure trove of inspiration and ideas for what we can all do in our own sketchbooks and journals. My main beef with this book is that while there are loads of photos, some of them are not all that big and it's hard to see the details in the pieces. Make sure you have a magnifying glass!